Rich Communications Services (RCS) is a platform that enables delivery of communication experiences to users beyond voice and short message service (SMS) text, such as instant messaging or chat, live video calling, file sharing, and so on. An enabling technology of RCS has been the transition from legacy circuit-switched network technology to packet-switched network technology based on Internet Protocol (IP), such as the packet-switched network provided by the IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS). Today's RCS platform also provides a presence service that allows users with RCS-capable communication devices to share presence information with other users of the network. The RCS presence service is implemented according to the specifications defined by the Open Mobile Alliance (OMA), such as OMA SIMPLE Presence Technical Specification (TS) 2.0 and the OMA SIMPLE Presence eXtensible Markup Language (XML) Document Management (XDM) TS 2.0.
According to these OMA specifications, in order to utilize the RCS presence service, a first user's client device provides presence information to a presence server, which stores the presence information in association with the first user, often referred to as a “presentity.” Thereafter, the presence information of the presentity can be made available to other users that request this presence information, these requesting users often referred to as “watchers.” However, in order to authorize sharing of presence information with watchers, the OMA specifications call for the client device of a presentity to provide explicit permission to the IMS network to share its capabilities with watchers. Today, this is accomplished by the presentity client transmitting an XML document containing “presence authorization rules” (abbreviated herein as “pres-rules”) to a storage server called an XML Document Management Server (XDMS). The XDMS stores an XML document for each presentity that publishes presence information to the presence server of the IMS network. Thereafter, the presence server may retrieve pres-rules from the XDMS, as needed, in order to process requests for presence information received from watchers.